A series of seemingly unrelated events:
- Prep and surgery for breast cancer
- Salmon Rushdie attacked onstage
- The movie “Vengeance” (in theaters or on Amazon Prime)
- Reading “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Tolstoy
(A question doubtless arising in some of your minds at this point: “Is Shannon on pain medication right now?” The answer is, “Yes!”)
But the connections between these things – and, even more, the sum total conclusions arising from the connections – has me reeling not with med-head dopiness but with blown-mind clarity.
Start with prep and surgery for breast cancer…
Access to state-of-the-art modern medicine makes me one very lucky lady. My cancer was caught in its infancy and ripped out before it could become a tyrannical toddler. Its “little buddy” side-kick wasn’t even an infant disease yet – just a potential infant disease, visible only via high-tech magnetic radiation – but it’s been ripped out, too. The livid scar in my armpit testifies to other ripped-out-entities: lymph nodes, which probably didn’t even have potential infant disease characteristics. (They are headed to a lab for analysis, just in case.)
All this carefully prescribed violence to my body is life-preserving in nature. The doctors kill the cancer so that the cancer cannot kill me. It’s a quid pro quo very much in my favor. My present hurts = my ongoing healing.
Shift to Salmon Rushdie. His physical hurts – so much more grievous and painful than mine! – were meted out not by precise scalpels and IV needles, but by a knife-wielding maniac who saw Rushdie, himself, as a cancer that needed killing.
Rushdie has been under a fatwa (an official death sentence delivered by Iranian Islamic authorities) for decades, based on alleged heresy contained in his magical-realism novel of 1988, The Satanic Verses. He had emerged from hiding back in the ‘90s and lived as an iconic celebrity of free-speech-at-all-costs… until he was stabbed this August 12th while preparing to deliver a speech to the Chautauqua Institution in New York state.
This begs the question:
What kind of ideological cancer demands the killing of a real-life person based on their having written a work of fiction?
Rushdie’s attacker, age 24, had not even been born when the fatwa was proclaimed. Clearly, this kind of cancer can survive, hidden, and then erupt unexpectedly and lethally. Equally clearly, this cancer of thinking translates directly into a cancer of acting; killing cancer = cancer killing.
The profound irony at the core of the Salmon Rushdie attack is this:
Rushdie has been an outspoken advocate of free speech as one whose literal life has been on the line in service of his literary life.
Engaged to address a group whose woke censorship habits have resulted in a language that calls careless words “violence”, Rushdie’s willingness to offend catalyzed not the “violence” of the Twitter mob and cancel culture but the violence of muscle, blade, and blood.
This real violence – shocking to an audience long acclimated to fake / woke “violence” – has resulted in the opposite of cancellation… Rushdie’s books are flying off the shelves of bookstores worldwide, and his 1988 novel has re-entered UK book-sellers charts, 34 years after it was initially published.
Cancel culture – and its presumptive redefinitions of what “violence” means – cannot self-sustain in the face of the costs of real violence meted out to punish real freedom of speech. In a loop of logic worthy of magic realism, real violence and real freedom of speech cancels cancel culture.
Segue now to “Vengeance”.
You may have seen previews – they are hilarious, suggesting a movie that pokes fun at West Texas gun culture and East Coast woke prissiness in equal measure. Mark and I streamed it because laughter can be therapeutic.
But what we got was not comedy. What we got was a cancer diagnosis – of our culture. The diagnosis was so compelling, so convincing, and so complete that we stayed up way too late sorting through the implications.
Where we landed: the disease depicted in “Vengeance” bears more resemblance to the ideological cancer of Rushdie’s attacker than to the physical cancer for which I’m being treated – but it results in dead bodies, nonetheless.
More precisely, it results in dead people – some of whose bodies are dead.
Beginning with caricature and cliches about our polarized culture, the storytellers of “Vengeance” create a hypnotic effect not unlike the magical realism in Satanic Verses… What is real? Who is real? What does reality even mean?
Those whom we initially ridicule become those whom we ultimately revere.
Those whom we initially esteem become those from whom we recoil.
Layers of subterfuge compete with layers of superficiality and stupidity.
All the layers tangle and contort against the ultimate verisimilitude: ubiquitous celebrity-seeking, from all parties, at all times.
Weird connective tissue: the pain medications that are helping me sleep and therefore helping me heal, post-surgery, are the same drugs that are at the root of the physical deaths in “Vengeance.”
Ergo, one person’s soothing elixir is another person’s life-sucking addiction in much the same way that one person’s ideological cancer is another person’s life-threatening stab wounds.
And now for the old-fashioned Russian fable that decisively ties all these loose ends up:
Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Ilyich almost exactly 100 years before Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses.
The books have almost nothing in common, except that both consider questions of purpose in the face of mortality – surely as timeless a theme as exists in literature.
I read the Tolstoy novel yesterday, simply to have something to do while stuck in this sore & sleepy in-between stage of post-surgical limbo.
The book’s startling beauty and equally startling pathos evaporated my sleepiness (at least temporarily) – but what really kept me awake and churning was the “coincidence” of the varieties of death Tolstoy depicted with such deftness.
The status-worshiping Tsarist bureaucrats of Ivan Ilyich are the same people as the characters in “Vengeance” and the Twitter mob behind the Chautauqua Institution (albeit in better clothes):
Seeking ever greater prestige via ever more elite circles of acquaintanceship, they willingly sacrifice irreplaceable treasures of time and talent for fleeting notions of “fame”, yet end their lives utterly alone… rejected, obscure, even invisible.
No freedom in life; no real life in life.
And then, no redemption possible in the death that follows not-life.
Brutal.
And consistent, across genres and centuries.
Here’s what I am taking away from this concatenation of coincidences:
- The life that is worth fighting to save (whether from cancer or from assassins) is that life which is lived in freedom, for freedom. Not the “I did it my way” navel-gazing silliness of our generation’s notion of “freedom,” but the costly, careful, sacrificial freedom for which Tolstoy and Rushdie both labored. The freedom that insists on truth; the freedom that spawns beauty. That freedom; that life.
- Conversely, the “freedom” that is being peddled by our woke culture is as fraudulent as the “life” that so many “live” online – fake, flimsy, cheap. Not only is it not worth dying for, it’s not worth living. Not only is it not brave or revolutionary, it’s not even original – Tolstoy’s contemporaries were plodding around in it over a century ago. Breaking free of such “life” and such “freedom” means actually living… in the real world, for real.
- Death comes for all of us. For Salmon Rushdie, for Tolstoy, for the former’s would-be assassin and the latter’s immortal character Ivan Ilyich – for the pill-popping Texas rednecks and bed-hopping New York climbers in Vengeance – for the individual, real-life humans who constitute the Twitter mob. Nobody skips death. But we get to choose whether we skip life. In fact, we choose, whether we mean to choose, or not… moment by moment, hour by hour, season by season, we ARE choosing. Are we living? Are we living?
Of course, this has to come back to Jesus, because Jesus is both the only One who truly nailed the “truly living” concept while also defeating the “dying” concept (both conceptually and actually).
Where Tolstoy’s bureaucrats, Rushdie’s haters, the Twitter mob, and the various American types in “Vengeance” scope-lock on self-promotion, self-gratification, and self-justification, Jesus walks the opposite way, cradle to (empty) grave:
He lives in the moment, but with His eye on eternity and His ear cocked for the Father’s voice.
He deals with the people right in front of Him – touching them, healing them, feeding them, laughing with them.
He gives it all away – His time, His talent, His treasure – because He loves others more than He thinks about Himself.
Ultimately, then, Jesus is the cancer killer we all need. Wherever / whatever the disease we have to fight – physical, spiritual, ideological, technological, whatever – Jesus makes fighting worth it because Jesus makes living worth it. He spells it out for us, “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.” Whatever it is we are doing without Him? It isn’t living.
So, I commend to you The Satanic Verses and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and “Vengeance” as commentaries on cancer and as masterpieces of artistic excellence.
But I also remind you (and me) that they are just the footnotes of the Story, the real Story, the Story that matters – the one about Life.
And I remind all of us that we are writing that Story (or not) – today.